Rethinking the icons…

I already complained about the icons today, and there are a few things going on with them that are definitely moving in the right direction. And I’ve figured out the math on how to handle them even better.

However, Blue and Cinth and I were talking today, and there may be a better, more attractive way for us to handle the icons in general. We still need to do some mockups, but basically it would involve making the icons 2D and trying to keep them feeling like HUD elements that move around, tracking the squads, rather than elements in the 3D world.

For reference, the center of this screen is more or less the general style of GUI we’re going for:

Bear in mind, of course, that’s still incredibly early as a mock for the GUI.

In this new concept for squad icons, people will see those as basically being “part of the GUI,” kind of like how Iron Man would see targeting icons laid over top of real-world objects through his helmet, if that makes sense. We’ll see if it works out visually or not, but in theory it might.

Load-wise, we can probably do it in a way that is approximately equal in cost to rendering the 3D icons the way we’re doing them right now. In theory.

Luckily we have a ton of testers now, so we can easily do A:B testing on a wide array of hardware and OSes, right? Such an awesome resource to have you folks. 🙂

Anyway, we’re going to do some prototypes of the bomber and fighter, and then see where that gets us. Worst case, we keep with the existing style we’ve already established, minus being so crazy over-glowy.

I already have plans on changing up how squad selection visually looks, so this might fit well with that. The actual visuals for the ships themselves are already nicely set and we’re cranking through them, but there are various other areas of the game that aren’t nearly so far along.

Obviously the GUI itself is just completely test junk right now in the actual game.

I had thought the icons were pretty final, but we think we might be able to do better.

The planets are pretty final, but I’m less happy with the background spaceboxes at this point and want to redo those if possible.

I’m not really happy with the shot graphics at all, but that’s not really a crisis because it’s just the first one anyhow. That’s right up my alley in terms of making a lot of that stuff look amazing.

The wormholes I created are something I hate, and both Cinth and I have been poking at ways to do a replacement.

The ship contrails are reasonably final unless we think of something better as a way to handle that, although I’d had concerns about performance.

The particle effects for ships exploding and similar are nice, but I don’t see those as being final anymore. I had thought they were, except needing to be scaled better for the types of ships in question… but now I want something more dramatic, and have a good idea of how to do it.

Overall I’ve been getting a much better idea even since just yesterday of how much room I have in which to play with visuals before it starts making some hardware unable to be used. I’m really pleased with early results, since so far I have a bit more room to play than I thought.

Anyhow, apologies for not having the next release ready today. I will definitely have that out tomorrow. Thanks also for the torrent of early feedback, it’s been really useful!